I’ve just uploaded a new video, some basic green screen background replacement tests I’ve been playing around with the last few days.

Shot on the Canon HG10 with the green screen set up in the sitting room; I was on my own so had to keep it simple with the camera set up on the tripod. I only had one construction light so it was pretty difficult to key properly after.

The first shot was the easiest, adding the alley to footage of me walking on the spot and then playing with the scale and position to add some movement. The second shot took a while to get right, my first attempt was scraped after I got well and truly lost in 3D & time.

Attempt 2 went better, but you’ll notice as I raise the gun at the start that it disappears briefly, I spent hours trying to adjust things so that wouldn’t happen. I’m told it’s not my fault… it’s something called inter-frame compression on the camera. I’ve had Sla explain it to me a few times and kind of understand it but if I tried to explain it then my head would explode.

The next problem I had was timing the movements of the two separate clips of me with the background as the camera follows the bullet. Once everything was in sync I added the muzzle flash and the bullet hit. I did some very basic colour correction on the whole thing and added the bars, some sound effects from iLife and music from Garageband.

The first version of the shot was sped up by precisely 715% (thanks Sla) to get the fast whip and the second shot plays at the speed I put the whole thing together but appears in slow motion thanks to a nice bit of sound design, once again thanks Sla.

Finally, after explaining inter-frame compression several times then cleaning up my speed and sound issues, Sla added some colour grading in Magic Bullet.

Overall, it was good fun and better practice and as always comments, feedback or advice are welcome.

This new video, ‘Seven Day Mile‘, is the first of four videos from the night (one of each of the acts), we’ll be uploading a new video every week in the run up to the April Sessions and hopefully by the time the Sessions close at the end of this year we’ll have built up a great collection of videos over on KilkennyMusicTV.

Shot on a Canon HG10 and Sony Hybrid HandyCam; with the Canon set up on a tripod at the back of the room and me with the Sony at the front right of the stage (standing on a chair) with Ken recording the tracks through the desk and mixing in Pro Tools.

Cut together using Final Cut Express 4 (the other three are currently rough cut), Ken designed the titles and overlays and I added them in After Effects. In post I also added some zooms to the shots from the Canon.

I’m really looking forward to the constant flow of video footage for editing practice, I’m currently working on an animated intro sequence for the videos and we’ve got a few more content ideas that we’ll be adding as we go along.

Don’t forget to subscribe to KilkennyMusicTV for upcoming videos and keep an eye on KilkennyMusic for news on the next One Take Sessions.

Ken had asked me weeks ago if I was interested in throwing something together for it but with the run of ‘Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!’ we had forgotten about it. With the play finished and the awards looming we met up on Tuesday afternoon to brainstorm ideas. Most of the afternoon was spent drinking tea and coming up with dead-end scenarios, all we knew for certain was that we wanted it to focus on the highly debated topic of late “Blogging is Dead!”.

The videos had to be sent on Friday so given our time constraints we needed to keep it simple, opting to go for a single set-up news bulletin with everything shot on green screen (giving me more practice in After Effects). We met up again on Wednesday for the shoot in my sitting room. The main problem was a lack of lights, Ken brought a double-headed construction work light but only one of the lights worked; I used this to light the green screen and used my small desk lamp to light Ken. It wasn’t ideal but we were working against the clock. We shot the whole thing in about 20 minutes with Ken as the Net News Nightly reporter and me as the terrorist leader responsible for the death of blogging.

The opening sequence was put together using a royalty free graphics sequence and music from the iLife collection then I added the animated titles designed by Ken. The background behind Ken is another royalty free graphic sequence, the green screen removal is a bit rough but that’s simply because of the lack of lights. The riot footage was pulled offline and Ken designed Sky News style overlays which I added to the entire sketch.

With the rough cut assembled, all the backgrounds replaced and the overlays in place, we added the finishing touches with the scrolling bar at the bottom displaying retweets from Twitter about the death of blogging and finally a completely random image of a cat and a laptop to finish Net News Nightly; your daily internet news… nightly!

I’m told there was a great response to the video at the awards on Saturday night, having missed the session this year I’m already making a plan to go to next years awards and hopefully we’ll put together another video for that too.

You can check out all the videos from the night here and you can see the list of Irish Blog Awards 2010 winners here, well done to all the winners.

As I’ve said before, I’d like to put the photos up in the order that the scenes appear in the episodes, not in the order they were shot. The result of that choice is quite confusing; the shooting schedule was pretty complicated and scattered, I’ve got over 2000 photos from the shoot that need to be put in the right order before I can work on them. After previous episodes I was aware how frustrating it was to have to hold back on uploading shots to avoid spoilers. It meant that I had looked at the shots so many times before they went up that I just wasn’t happy with them anymore.

Thankfully, over the past few months I’ve learned a few new tricks and tips, I’m beginning to concentrate on the overall presentation of my work and I have a lot of new ideas with plenty of photos stocked up to test them out on. Recently I’ve been looking at a lot of commercial photography and in particular image sequences, it’s something I wanted to try. I was never quite happy with the final presentation of most of my Vultures character portraits, so as a test I revisited three individual shots of the gentlemen detectives of V.P.I: Niall Tennyson (Séan Hackett), Jim Vultour (John Morton) and Dan McGrain (David Thompson), each standing outside the red door exterior location used for the V.P.I offices.

I wasn’t happy with the overall finish of the shots but at the time didn’t know what to do with them. Now, I’ve done a bit more work on them and feel they go better together in a sequence which you can see here.

I’ve also uploaded a couple of behind the scenes shots from the scene in episode 5 where Dan McGrain stalks Tom Moriarty. For such a small scene it was surprisingly complicated to shoot; with bits of the scene being shot on different shoot days. The stuff where McGrain gets a lift from Noah (Gus McDonagh), who suggests running him over, was shot on Shoot Day 22.

We only had four days to shoot any scene featuring Noah and it was the most intense four days of shooting overall; attempting to shoot scenes that were bigger and more complicated than anything we’d shot before. We had been shooting all day and then before we completely lost the light we picked up this part of the sequence. Gus can’t drive so we simply found a quiet street in an estate, with a gradual slope and then we slowly pushed the car along. Sla was positioned sitting back-to-front in the passenger seat to get the shot and I watched on the monitor through the window as we pushed the car along. I didn’t get any photos.

But I did get a nice shot of McGrain watching Tom through his binoculars at the Black Abbey. It was Shoot Day 37 and it was horrible. I can’t remember what else was shot earlier that day but we went to pick up the shot outside Frank Walls and it began to rain, ice cold rain. Snow was soon to follow. We moved quickly to the Black Abbey, the rain stopped but then Sla got called away. We attempted to shoot without him (NOTE: never attempt to shoot without Sla), but we ran out of tapes. There was more in the office but Sla had the keys. It was a painful day!

The rest of the stalking sequence was shot on Shoot Day 39, the last day of shooting. I’ve uploaded two new shots from behind the display of the Canon XA H1 featuring McGrain watching Tom leave his house and one shot of Tom leaving his house with Isabelle watching him strut away. Shooting the rest of the sequence where Tom walks through town and all the ladies swoon was hilarious but I didn’t get any photos, I was either laughing too much or in awe of sexy Tom Moriarty!?

Episode-wise, the stalking sequence leads us back to the office, Quint Quigley makes his entrance and then all hell breaks loose with a chase sequence through the various lanes of Kilkenny. We shot the office interior stuff with Quint on a different weekend entirely, where we also shot the dialogue for the start of the chase sequence. We shot the chase sequence itself over the intense weekend that Gus was available, on that day in particular the Post Office on High Street had been robbed and so the high presence of squad cars and helicopters added to the mood.

Sla managed to nab a couple of handy pick-up shots throughout the day and we got quite a lot of funny looks. We started an hour later than planned, somebody got delayed, it was already going to be a tough day and now we had to pick up speed. In the hour wait, I managed to pick up a character portrait of Alan Dawson as the randomer-punching eye-patch-wearing samurai-sword-swinging Pinkerton goon which you can check out here on the Oss237.com homepage.

Shooting was quick and frantic, we were against the clock,  shooting the sequence in order, quick handheld set-ups that I had mapped out in advance, moving through the various lanes, dashing across roads, dodging traffic and occasionally having to hold for human traffic wandering through shots or simply for actors trying to catch their breath. I kept putting my script and flask down for set-ups only to forget them. Thankfully Pip was with us and was good enough to constantly pick them up for me!

The chase sequence was also the first introduction of new Pinkerton goon BrickMan played by Matty Gargan. I didn’t get to take many shots that day but I had already snapped his character portrait during Shoot Day 8 where we shot some of Ned Savage’s montage sequence for episode 6. Again I wasn’t entirely happy with the finish of the overall shot so I’ve gone back and worked on it to produce a two-shot sequence that properly introduces BrickMan, you can check it out here.

Following the chase through the lanes we moved location to an industrial estate to shoot the end of the sequence where Noah shows up to rescue the detectives and Quigley, which was then followed by a location move to Jenkinstown woods to shoot Noah’s montage sequence from episode 6, but I’ll talk more about those scenes when I get the photos sorted.

The result of the quick-paced shoot for the chase scene meant I didn’t get a lot of time to take photos but I had a couple of rough shots. Alone I wasn’t happy with them, they were taking on a corner as the lads ran uphill and towards the camera. I hid behind a car out-of-shot to get the photos during a take, but as they came around the corner the sun was shining and I didn’t have the chance for a second take or adjusting settings. It also wasn’t ideal to be trying to shoot all this action on a 50mm lens, focus was a nightmare. So rather than not have some of the scene captured in photos I spent a bit of time working on the five shots I had (seen at the top of this post), playing with colouring and textures for a sequence that I’m very happy with, for a first attempt at this sort of thing.

I wanted to give it a film sequence look, making it look like old film footage that had been slightly damaged and exposed. To finish it off I added some lines directly from the script that best described the scene and explained what exactly was going on in the sequence.

So please have a look at The Chase Sequence and as always any comments, critcism or feedback would be greatly appreciated. More photos on the way soon.

The possibilities are so huge that it hurts my brain, I’ve been slowly but surely getting the hang of it. I’m also delighted to say that I’ve received a FilmBase training bursary, thanks to Artlinks and I’m really looking forward to doing some After Effects training soon.

The above video contains my first attempts at using AE; a quick and simple animated title sequence, for a video I shot of the awesome ‘Remember Me In 1983‘ exhibition by local artist Mick Minogue. The exhibition opened in the Coach Road Studio on August 7th as part of the Arts Festival 2009 and ran for several weeks.

I’ve known Mick for many years and his artistic skills have always amazed me, there’s no denying he has a style (he’s also a snappy dresser) but this was the first of his exhibitions that I felt was really Mick’s work; a nostalgic trip back to Saturday mornings in the 80’s, where you got up before the sun did, to overload on awesome cartoons while you stuffed your face with toast and sugary cereal. He even had a Saturday morning Cereal & Cartoons Opening.

As a child of the eighties and a big kid at heart, ‘Remember Me In 1983′ featured all of my Saturday morning favourites; the Thundercats, the Turtles, Ghostbusters, Defenders of the Earth and more, surrounded by 80’s toys and gaming systems to help set the mood. My favourite had to be ‘The Boss – The Final Showdown‘; an awesome 3D piece featuring Guile and M.Bison from StreetFighter 2.

I shot the exhibition video (above) about two weeks after it opened; I didn’t have any particular cut in mind when I was shooting the footage and the delay came due to two failed edit attempts. I tried using the different theme tunes but it just wasn’t working out so I ended up cutting the video to an awesome track that Mick gave me; made up of Super Mario sound effects.

Neither myself or Mick have any idea who this track is by, but if anybody knows then please let me know so I can add it to the credits. It was kind of tricky for me to cut this together, given the limited focus abilities on the Canon HG10, I had to keep the shots simple and I hadn’t cut anything like this before so I played around with some different cutting patterns.

As I’ve said, the video also features my first attempts using After Effects; beginning with an animated title sequence using one of many awesome promotional posters for the exhibition. I separated elements of the poster into different layers then animated various properties to make them move.

Check out the ‘Remember Me In 1983 – Exhibition Video‘ and as usual all feedback, comments and criticisms are welcome.

Don’t forget to check out Mick Minogue’s blog for more of his awesome work. I can’t wait for his next exhibition, I hope he includes some M.A.S.K stuff next time (these guys not this guy!).

Myself and Dave have talked about working together for quite some time, we’re currently working on scripts and fleshing out ideas, but we were both eager to just get out and shoot something quick and simple. I have a growing list of effects shots I want to try out so we decided to try shooting somebody getting hit by a speeding car.

The first attempt was pretty much a disaster, shooting in an industrial estate on a Sunday afternoon, the weather turned against us and the battery on the camera began to die in the middle of shooting. But more importantly, the car-hit effect itself was awful. Given my lack of green screen or After Effects I had to be able to create the effect in Final Cut Express 4, the first attempt involved reversing footage to make it look like the car was speeding towards me and it just didn’t look good enough.

The second attempt went a lot better, although the weather continued to be a pain in the ass on the day making the continuity of shots a bit rough. We started by shooting all of my sequence in the car park, running through “my lines” and then me reacting to the car hitting me. Then, using the same set-up, I cleared the frame and Dave drove the car through the shot.

Whilst the sky provided an awesome cloudy backdrop in the shot, continuity would prove a problem later when I tried to put the shots together for the car-hit effect. For anybody else trying it, I recommend using a background that will not change. There was also the problem of cars moving from the parking spaces behind me and poor sound due to the main road beside us. But we didn’t worry too much about it, that’s the joy of test shoots.

As we began shooting the car sequences we had to move quickly as the weather got worse, meaning most shots had one take. Dave insisted on being beside a lake polishing his car so we shot that first. This sequence is the only one shot on my Canon HG10, using my MiniDV Steadicam to track in for Dave’s dialogue. Everything else was shot on a Canon XA H1 (thanks Sla). We’d pick a spot of road, I’d set up and Dave would drive by, then he’d turn around, pick me up and we’d move further down the road and repeat the process until we made it back to the car park. Then we shot the car interior.

When it came to editing I began with the effects shot; using the master shot where I turn and react to the speeding car then cropping that shot, matching it with the shot of the car so that it all happened at the same time. I pulled a screen shot from FCE and using Photoshop I removed a still image of me reacting from the background. I then replaced the background with green and imported the image back into my timeline.

Then it was a matter of replacing myself with the still image, just as the car hits me and chroma-keying out the green in the image. Then using key-frames I moved the still image with the car as it drags me out of the frame, adding motion blur to the still image to make it blend in. I deliberately kept the framing of this shot pretty tight, standing near the edge of frame so that once the car hits me it all happens very quickly.

The only problem was that in the time between shooting my reaction to the car hit and the shot of the car speeding through, the clouds had changed dramatically in the background. Once the car entered the frame, it caused a ripple as the skyline jumped from one shot to the other. At first I attempted to crop the shots but it was still noticeable. I then tried to use key-frames to move the crop as I moved and the car moved but again it was still too noticeable, as the crops created little boxes around myself and the car.

To solve the problem (like all my editing problems) I asked Alan Slattery, who gave me a crash course in “nesting”. To be honest I don’t really know how to explain the process but it involved pulling sections of one skyline and layering it on top of the effects shot to eliminate the changing clouds. To add more movement to the still image of me being hit by the car, we distorted the shape of the original green screen image and then added it a couple of frames into the effect; the result gives that impression of me buckling and hitting the bonnet of the car.

I added some sound effects to add to the viciousness of the impact and used a royalty free orchestral flurry as the music used when Dave is driving. It’s a bit repetitive (the loop is only 13 seconds long) but I think it adds something funny to the whole thing.

I sat in with Sla as he worked his colour correcting magic and then used Magic Bullet to add a cooler look, bringing up the blues along with the contrast and saturation. Having viewed ‘The Game‘ on several different monitors over the past month, I noticed there was quite a big difference in the overall look, depending on the computer I was using. In some cases, the footage was a lot darker and a lot more saturated so we were careful not to over do it this time.

As always any feedback or criticism are welcome (bear in mind that this was a practically improvised test shoot) with the emphasis more on the effect at the end than the dialogue making sense etc. If anybody has any questions on the effect then feel free to ask.

Also check out whatsdaveminogue.blogspot.com for Dave’s version of how the shoot went. We’ll soon be getting to work on our next collaboration. But for now, please enjoy: ‘Turn Around!‘

First up is the shot from the test shoot in my sitting room; having spent a lot of time in the Mill studio with the lads during recording, we had worked out some ideas for the cover; the main ideas involving the band, a couch and a big old television.

With the recording finished and the tracks in the mixing stages, we met up for two photo-shoots on the last weekend in May. The first on the Saturday night, I re-arranged the furniture in my sitting room and used every lamp and light I could find around the house to try different lighting techniques, while the lads chilled out on the couch finding gross things on the internet.

Most of the lighting set-ups were a disaster but the set-up for the finished shot is as follows: there’s a household lamp positioned behind the couch to back-light the lads, another lamp positioned to the right of Ken as a side-light and another lamp lighting the back of the television. The glow from the television wasn’t bright enough to light all three faces so I used the screen from my Powerbook G4 and my Sb800 positioned on the floor (I can’t remember the setting).

The resulting shot was the best thing I got on the night but wasn’t exactly what I was going for or suitable for the album cover, but that’s the great thing about test shoots. The following afternoon we drove to the new HotShotz Studio in Callan (thanks Benny) and having a better idea of what we were now going for, I set up the studio for my first ever shoot on a Canon (EOS 5D with a EF24-105mm Zoom).

My first proper studio shoot was a lot of fun, I spent some time spotting the lights and we spent the afternoon tweaking positions and poses as you can see in the behind the scenes video from the photoshoot (above).

If you haven’t got your hands on a copy of Insula yet then the video features the awesome track  ‘Acid’ and a look at the finished front cover design by Ken McGuire.

The album will be available online in the next few weeks through SouthOfficial.com but until then if you want to purchase a copy of Insula then just get in touch with South on MySpace.

This episode was easily the toughest to cut together; I had to shave about 14 minutes off it. It meant having to sacrifice a lot of good footage which unfortunately wouldn’t stand alone. In some cases it meant cutting some scenes short, in others it meant losing entire songs from the web-series.

The final installment begins like Episode 2; with another out-take’s slash ‘Previously’ sequence; a brief look at some of the laughs and “Christian Bale moments” during the recording sessions, before moving on to look at the recording of ‘Acid’ (previously unheard).

Anybody who saw the teaser trailer will recognise the first shot; which tracks through the studio just before Daw begins on the drums. For those interested; this is the only opportunity to see the benefits of colour grading, as the teaser trailer shows the raw footage compared to the overall finished look.

This sequence with the drums had to be cut very short, the full length version covers the entire drum take; with Daw messing up at the end only to have to start again. Several times. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t put it all in.

Instead, the episode moves on to recording the bass for ‘Acid’, some technical difficulties, a bit of worrying, Ken’s hilarious struggle with “the retarded tuner”. There’s a sneak preview of “the magic sex chords” for previously unheard ‘Over My Eyes’ and more.

As the days in the studio passed by in a blur, the lads slowly but surely ticked off their progress on the chart, songs were finished, a lot of munch got munched, we drank way too much Monster Ripper and Thomas slowly got used to me sticking a camera in his face and finally did some talking.

Episode 3 finishes with a final sneak preview, another previously unheard song ‘Life Goes On’, which features on the soon to be launched debut album. This was actually the second music video sequence I cut together during the editing process. This was when I first figured out how to layer the footage so I could show more than one thing at the same time. I was wary of getting too carried away with using the effect but given the limits of operating the two cameras at the same time and sound of the song in particular, I wanted to blend the footage so the transitions flowed with the song (my favourite transition happens at about 8mins 26 secs).

The final episode going online brings me close to the end of my first solo project. I still have a whole bunch of photos that I’ll get them online in the coming weeks. You can check out my brand new Episode 3 promo shot here on the Oss237.com homepage. The response and feedback to the project has been very encouraging so far and as always comments, criticism or feedback are greatly appreciated.

Don’t forget that South & The Lions Mane will take to the stage in Cleere’s Theatre this Saturday. It’s going to be awesome! Doors open 9:30pm and admission is €6.

The second installment in the series begins with a little “Previously” sequence, although it’s more of an out-take sequence; seeing as none of the footage seen actually appears in the first episode. Over the course of the recording process the running joke in the studio (every time something went wrong or we were having a laugh) was for somebody to say “previously on South”. When it came to cutting the footage, instead of losing all of the funny bits I simply cut them into a little previously section.

Episode 2 begins by filling in the missing pieces from Episode 1; covering the guitar and bass recording for ‘Downpour’. The first episode could have given the impression that recording the song was quick and easy, I wanted to show that the process took a couple of days; as each instrument was recorded on a different day and the song was slowly pieced together.

It’s also important to note that bassist (and ladie’s man) Ken Farrell says that ‘Downpour’ is “the last song on the album”; at the time of recording it was but having reviewed the finished tracks the lads from South decided to change the track listing and ‘Downpour’ is now track 9 but rest assured it’s still “got rain in it”!

This episode also shows a bit more of the difficulties faced by Producer/Engineer Alan Dawson as he tried to record himself playing the drums. There’s also some bass and guitar takes for different songs that appear on the album. Because of time-constraints I had to cut about 4 minutes off this episode; meaning quite a few takes and songs had to be cut.

Shooting without any script meant that when cutting it was difficult to keep whole conversations that ran too long. I had to chop bits and pieces of dialogue and sometimes cut it so people are actually having conversations with themselves over different days. So when trying to put some narrative structure to the whole thing and keep it at a good pace; I decided to cut back and forth between the scenes. Only showing what was necessary to piece it all together.

As with the previous episode (and the final one), this episode features a song that will appear on the upcoming album, in this case ‘Symmetry‘. This music video sequence was actually the third one I cut together, back when the plan was for four episodes, but once I chopped it down to three I decided to swap the music-video sequences around so that the final episode would finish with another brand new song.

By the time it came to cutting ‘Symmetry’, I had gotten a bit more adventurous with my cutting patterns; I had discovered that by layering the shots, I could show more going on at the same time. This is also used in Episode 3, but in an effort to keep similiar shots/set-ups fresh and make the videos separate to each other; with ‘Symmetry’ I tried alternating cutting patterns between the layers, cutting to the music so that most of the time what you see at that point is what you really hear when you listen to the song. I’m not sure if that will make sense when you read it but hopefully it will when you watch the video.

As always comments and feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks to everyone who watched the first episode; myself and the lads from South have been very happy with all the feedback. Hopefully you’ll enjoy this new episode just as much.

South – ‘The Making Of Insula’ Episode 3 goes online next Friday.